Sunday, December 30, 2007

Competitive martyrdom

Mr. Abraham Foxman made an accusation that Mel Gibson, producer of The Passion Of the Christ, “doesn’t understand the difference between dying in a famine and people being cremated for what they are.’’

But, does Mr.Foxman understand the difference?!

If Mr. Foxman is referring to the 1932-33 hunger holocaust - Holodomor - (during which millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, for example, were murdered through deliberate starvation) as just 'some casual famine', then it is a truly disengenuous and denigrating approach on an issue ostensibly meant, according to Rabbi Marvin Hier, “not to engage in competitive martyrdom, but in historical truth.”

Mr. Foxman, in his eagerness to attack Gibson, ignorantly dismisses the Ukrainian genocide and becomes a HOLODOMOR DENIER - and still, writer Sharon Waxman didn't blink an eye on this, and neither did the National Post!

The truth includes acknowledging that the Holodomor famine was planned and carried out by Communists such as Joseph Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich as a template for state genocide against an identifiable population. State Communists targeted millions of people in Ukraine ‘for who they were’, just as state Nazis targeted millions more in occupied Europe a scant decade later - and Ukrainians were also murdered in the Holocaust by Nazis - a narrative conveniently downplayed and ignored by folks like Mr. Foxman. [A story by Rebeca Kuropatwa (May.24, 2012, The Jewish Tribune) quoted Belle Millo, chair of Winnipeg's Holocaust Education Centre, saying: "Fifty-five million people died in the Holocaust, six million of whom were Jewish men, women and children."]

It is shocking to haggle over degrees of which victims deserve higher recognition, when the bloodfest was so absolute.

Tainting Mel Gibson with hollow charges of anti-Semitism is a transparent tactic, when unfortunately it seems that "competitive martyrdom" is exactly the issue.

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Historian Stanislav (Stanley) Kulchytsky wrote a six-part series analyzing the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine as genocide, titled "Why did Stalin exterminate the Ukrainians?", which appeared in a Ukrainian publication, The Day, during Oct., Nov., and Dec. of 2005. Here are the links to read Kulchytsky's astounding series: